back to article US gives Chinese man 2.5 years over fake Cisco kit

A Chinese man has been sentenced to a two and half year stretch in California for flogging counterfeit Cisco parts in the US. Yongcai Li will also have to repay $800,000 to Cisco Systems, for selling the kit, which carried fake Cisco trademarks. He had shipped the kit into the US in 2005 and 2006, prosecutors said. The US …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Profit?

    "For some reason, Cisco kit is a particular favourite of counterfeiters. "

    Probably something to do with Cisco pricing versus the actual costs of production and marketing....

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Flame

    It is obvious why it is a favourite

    There was a point when could play "spot the difference" with the mid-range Huawei kit and Cisco. It was possible to swap some of the modules between some of them. They were using software that looked the same to the user and was "suspiciously" bug-for-bug compatible and crashed under the same conditions.

    However, Cisco for some unknown reasons dropped the case it had in court and nobody knows the real reasons why... Skeletons? Closet?

  3. Eduard Coli
    Troll

    Doors

    As if the *real* Cisco kit did not come with backdoors...

  4. Ferret
    WTF?

    Is anyone else wondering why...

    ...we have yet to hear about people in China being prosecuted for actually *manufacturing* the fake Cisco gear?

  5. This post has been deleted by its author

  6. David Halko
    Unhappy

    Huawei, Cisco, and knock-off gear

    "For some reason, Cisco kit is a particular favourite of counterfeiters. In December, two Kansas men were charged with making $1m by slapping phony Cisco labels on networking kit which they had obtained in China."

    Huawei knocked-off boxes which worked just like Cisco. The IOS's were programmed by Cisco. They even distributed photocopied manuals with their products! The knocked-off Cisco gear has been a long time problem in China.

    Anonymous Coward posts, "Probably something to do with Cisco pricing versus the actual costs of production and marketing...."

    Probably not.

    The cost of good equipment is more than just the box being shipped out the door, it has to do with the cost of software creation, software support, patches, documentation creation, and the infrastructure to maintain all of this. People from Cisco are paid to exist & participate on various standards boards. They help to draw up the standards for protocols that we use every day on the Internet.

    Having worked with these boxes as well as boxes from many others in the industry, I can tell you, there is a reason why there are so many other small vendors... cheap solutions that were implemented on-the-cheap. Because solutions were implemented on-the-cheap, they will not get great market share, because the market is looking for a reliable inexpensive solution.

    Ferret posts, "Is anyone else wondering why we have yet to hear about people in China being prosecuted for actually *manufacturing* the fake Cisco gear?"

    Huawei was forced to stop selling the knocked-off Cisco gear, they released a new line of products (which actually had non-photocopied Cisco documentation, what a concept.)

    China has a huge telecommunications infrastructure which needs to be built, so this area is vital to their national well being. The Chinese will kill people for getting an ingredient in a baby formula incorrect, but when something is vital to their well being, a slap on the wrist and threatening a time-out is about all that is delivered.

    No prosecutions, no reparations for loss of revenue, no nothing but a cease-and-desist order to one major company, but there are still plenty of factories which build knock-off gear an move around on a regular basis because there is so much profit in the illegal work.

    If Cisco wanted to press this issue at the national level or at the international regulatory body level, they would risk losing the rights to sell in China - which is a risk too large for a corporation. In Communist nations, the leadership is often tied very closely to the judiciary - foreign companies play in their market with a high degree of risk with very unfair rules.

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